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Human Flow, a movie created and directed by Ai Weiwei, discusses the importance of the current international migrant crisis while making it as beautiful and awe-inspiring as possible. Ai Weiwei and his film captures the current state of the world and its humanity while exemplifying the empathy needed to deal with and improve the current status of the world. Ai Weiwei not only informs about the international crisis, but creates reasons to care about it in multiple ways.
One of these techniques places people and their stories/things they do/say to expose ideas and worlds typically not shown by media. From what I can remember, each dilemma portrayed both side of the story involved highlighting the current gap of the knowledge which leads to empathy. I found each story or segment of a person’s story important. Rather as seeing the migrants as one big nameless group, the audience sees people who have lives, hopes, and dreams. Even if they did not speak, the viewer was given reasons to care and to think about the current crisis going forward, not as a passing and past issue.
Another way Ai Weiwei created a feed of empathy for the crisis was to show the impact scale. This is seen through distance, population, destruction, economy, and so much more. The cinematography played an important role showing how many people had been dispersed, how many cities destroyed while also not framing the situation as always gloomy and bad. An example of this is when Ai Weiwei showed a camp and as the camera zoomed in on everything going on, a few children got up close and began goofing off like all children would do.
A third way Ai Weiwei creates empathy is through perspective whether of people or the world as a whole. He uses quotes and news headings during scrolling shots of landscapes and people, creating a world not in little clumps like race, nation, etc. but rather putting everything together showing how all of the crises across the globe impact us in the present and future.
Human Flow creates an awe-inspiring empathy which shows a sort of oneness that is both beautiful and terrifying. Its accessibility impacts every everyday people, not just big, worldly hot-shots or the migrants in the crisis itself.